Experience a casual showcase of innovations from across the museum field, offering you the chance to connect directly with the creators - federal agencies, associations, and inspired individuals alike. This year's roundtables include... 

Relationship Building: Do You Know Your Neighbor?
Presenters
Marina Gutierrez, Museum Education Coordinator, Agua Caliente Cultural Museum
Carolina Zataray, Senior Manager of Education and Public Engagement, Agua Caliente Cultural Museum

FREE!

Join your fellow Annual Meeting attendees for coffee while connecting with new colleagues and seeing familiar faces.

FREE!

Join your fellow Annual Meeting attendees for coffee while connecting with new colleagues and seeing familiar faces.

FREE!

Join the WMA Book Club to discuss what you're reading. Whether it's fiction, non-fiction, or museum-related, we want to know about the books living rent-free in your head.

Go behind the scenes to learn about the efforts of the Commission to Study the Potential Creation of a National Museum of Asian Pacific American History and Culture. Hear more about the Commission's process to create a comprehensive report examining the viability and long-term sustainability of a new national entity dedicated to the contributions and impact of Asian and Pacific Americans in the United States, and share your thoughts in a simulated visioning activity.

What methods can we use to work together in offering top-notch statewide programming and coordination? Join three organizations to discuss one model of large-scale cross-organization collaboration involving school programs teams from ten organizations. Through the iSEE partnership, museum and school staff work together to promote excellence in education, navigate challenging situations, maintain funding sources, and offer programming statewide. Participants will learn from presenters about the benefits and logistics of running programs of this kind.

This session highlights examples of successful collections engagement strategies that aspire to improve community relations and public relevance while building mutual trust between indigenous Pacific Islander communities and the collections/archives that house Oceanic ancestral belongings.

Your museum's growth depends on showing up where your audience lives: AI, Google, and social media. But how do you know if you're standing out—or even showing up? This session delivers a modern marketing playbook for the digital age. Learn to use AI tools to sharpen content, harness the $10K/month Google Ad Grant, reach new audiences through smarter segmentation, and prepare for a future where AI handles everything from customer service to ticket sales.

What if museum work didn't depend on a building? This session explores how public art can extend museum practice into everyday community spaces or function as museum space where no building exists. Using Springville, Utah's Art Loops and statewide public art systems as case studies, panelists will share how collaboration, policy, and collections shape this work. Attendees will leave with practical strategies to create scalable, public-facing experiences in any community.

Developing exhibits is often messy, straying from a prescribed set of rules. No matter how hard you try, scope creep can devolve into scope slaughter. Teams end up frustrated or disappointed. What causes exhibit making to go off the rails? When can you loosen up and make your own process? In this session, we will explore common pinch-points, offer practical advice, and muse on aspiring to "best practices"—which maybe aren't that perfect after all.